Du deuil familial à la glorification publique: représentations divergentes de la Première Guerre Mondiale dans la Roumanie de l’entre-deux guerres
From family mourning to public glorification: divergent representations of world war I in interwar Romania

Summary/Abstract: Is the memory of world war I the property of former combatants or is it rather the creation of intellectual circles, disposed to provide this event with a higher, political meaning? In Romania at least, the cult of the dead and the cult of victory did not provoke an open conflict, their symbiosis encouraging an eventually positive image of the “war of reunification”. If we absolutely want to find some tension, that is not gravitating around the antinomy between traditional religiosity and modern lay piety. This rather emerges on the edge of gnawing, implicit discrepancies between the individual and the community, between the village cemetery and the mass graves. Or, the merit of funerary folklore is that of providing to anyone those emotions able to revive the memory of the deceased, to give back, every now and then, their individuality. Consequently, the distinction the French had made between the mortuary and the commemorative monuments was more difficult to apply in Romania. The “civilization” of the village was not the same with urbanization or with its reduction to a bookish prototype. On the contrary, the Romanian officials were interested in preserving its specificity, in laying claim to it, extracting from the rural universe those factors of continuity that were susceptible to consolidate the filiations between the people and the elites.

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